Amongst all the rhetoric on one side about “big government” and on the other about “protecting the commons” lies a whole lot of denial about what government is: a protection racket.
They guard the property of the rich from us, for a fee, and protect us from the avarice of the Rich, again for a fee. Their representatives are called “politicians”. They grow organically in each society. One helpful function of politicians is to make sure that wealth doesn’t become so concentrated at the top that rebellion becomes inevitable-voting as safety valve. It also acts as a safety valve for wealth owners if economic conditions change. They can form new coalitions amongst themselves and remove a politician, as opposed to overthrowing a king or dictator who is the state personified.
Modern multi-party democracies allow us to choose amongst two or more “branded” protection rackets. Instead of serfs, we are customers. Like Al Capone’s gang giving out Christmas hams, they need our goodwill. But they’re also happy to have us pay a lot for shoddy work, if we let them.
We create the wealth, but they own it. I do not mean this in the Marxist sense–I mean that in choosing a protection racket, it behooves us to examine the coalition that forms it, what their interests are and how they pursue those interests. We must shake them down for all the goodies we can get without mortally wounding the economic interests that fund them. It is a delicate dance, fraught with fraud on both sides.
We must be careful not to let wealth hide behind God or Patriotism and make them stick to the facts, if for no other reason than this: neither God nor Patriotism in and of themselves create any wealth.
Make no mistake, government wealth and power are ultimately accumulated and backed up by guns and bombs–they are protection rackets. We can however force them, through politicians, whose currency is votes, to behave more (for lack of a better word) “civilized”. How we spend that currency largely determines that behavior. To give up on politicians completely (loathsome as most of them are) is self defeating. It is politicians who stand between us and naked force. Ask Iraqis or Afghans–whose societies lack true professional politicians–what that’s like.